Simon & Schuster A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death

Excellent advice that seems like it covers every eventuality as one anticipates the end of their life, or someone else's. Definitely a valuable reference book, to help plan for decisions and/or navigate a difficult time that we all will face. Highly recommend.

Not everyone would appreciate this type of book

Buyer beware! Annoyingly this hardcover edition is marked as a “remainder” with a big black mark on top near binding. The amount paid does NOT reflect it being a “bargain” book at a mere $3. off list price. I planned to gift this but won’t since it’s marked as a “bargain book”. I’ll find an ethical source for gift copy outside of Amazon. SMHHave watched many of BJ Miller’s videos so expect the content of this book to be helpful & presented in a thoughtful & compassionate manner. So I’d give the book itself 5 stars. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I bought this for a friend who was taking care of her aged Mother. I think it helped her deal with what was happening.

How does this book resonate? I can’t even count the ways. For me, BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger have woven a kind of shroud for the living – a lovely, pieced “cover so as to protect” (from shroud's Middle English root). They have covered the range of practical, emotional, spiritual and physiological guidance in preparing for our own end, and that of those we love. From large questions to ask about our own care plan, to specific spices and herbs to deal with taste changes with illness, to the range of natural reactions within the geography of grief, I found myself nodding, weeping, smiling, nodding. From their quilt of stories, I found myself wrapped in remembering those I’ve lost, some with time to prepare, others too suddenly. How helpful this protective cover would have been for my sister-in-law as she reckoned with leaving three young girls and my brother? For my friend and classmate at VCFA, a caregiver to his mother who absorbed that toll and died first? For my young patient-students and their families in a children’s hospital? How grateful, years later, to be reminded how my stepfather willed himself to wait until a bed opened up at the hospice center, days past his active dying began? (He didn't want to die in the bed our mother would be sleeping in.) People and memories cascaded throughout as I read, and I’m so grateful for this book’s careful, generous spirit, to allow those resonant gifts.I also found myself compelled to action. Why do I have all this crap in my house that I’ll “use someday”? Why haven’t I done more than prepare an advanced directive, like write a will by now, for Pete’s (and my siblings’) sake? (Finally called HR this morning about the ‘legal advice’ elective benefit I’ve been paying for so long.) How do I imagine my remains to be most useful, somehow, after I’m gone? (Biodegrading in a simple sack – where? - or mixed into concrete as a coral habitat in international waters, like a friend’s brother did, or spread over special soil, like the ‘cindres’ of my friend’s mother, that we cast over her childhood home in southern France? How long might I have to figure that one out?)And there’s the rub, the “bumping up against what [we] can’t necessarily command or comprehend,” as the authors say. Regardless, now we have the breathable, strong fabric of this book, all the insight and comprehension its authors share. It’s one of those books I’ll reread over time as I try to make the most of living at all. And I’ve found a book to give everyone I love, to pass on its protective layer, toward, as Browning put it, “the ends of being and ideal grace.”